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Anarcho-capitalists sometimes claim that under anarcho-capitalism, the problem of authority is eliminated, in that there are no authorities. Joseph Fetz just sounded a variation on that theme in the comments, when he claimed that under ancap, all relations will be contractual. Let us consider.

I "own" ten acres in the Poconos. It is steep land, falling past the house to a creek in the middle, and then rising to a ridge line. I probably have not been on my "back 5" in two or three years.

Tomorrow morning, I wake up to find that all government in the United States has been dissolved, and ancapistan has been declared. Tomorrow afternoon, a group of Lenape Indians arrives, and begins to erect cabins on the other side of the creek.

This prompts me to head over there. "Whoa, guys, what are you up to?" I ask them.

"Well, kemosabe, now that the evil United States government is out of the way, we are reclaiming our ancestral land. Oh, and we don't mind if yo…

Bob Murphy recently suggested that I must be using some idiosyncratic definition of 'politics' when I noted that anarcho-capitalism is quite obviously a political movement and advocating it is engaging in 'politics.'

Here is Michael Oakeshott defining 'politics' to open his essay "Talking Politics":

"Politics is not concerned with anything or everything which it may come into a man's head to want and to contend for but with the consideration of the arrangements and rules which give shape to an association of human beings."

We should note here:1) Oakeshott was a professor of politics;2) He quite probably had never heard of anarcho-capitalism when he penned those words; and3) He puts this forward as a commonplace idea, not worth arguing for but merely worth mentioning to orient his readers to what he will discuss.

If we ever see an anarcho-capitalist society, there will be plenty of politics going on in it, e.g. "considerations" of w…

Watching some lectures on differential equations, I hear the lecturer say, "If we can explicitly solve the equation, we can precisely predict all future states of the system."

The use of "precisely predict" here is very odd. If we are speaking of a pure mathematical system, then we are not "predicting" anything: all states of the system are called into being at once with the creation of the system of differential equations, which, even though we may label a variable 't', do not have a future or a past.

On the other hand, if he is speaking of an actual physical system (say, a mass-spring system), then "precisely" is grossly inaccurate: what he ought to have said is "We can predict future states of the physical system to whatever extent it does resemble and continues to resemble the abstract system of equations." Our predictions of the actual mass-spring's behavior based on the mass-spring equation will go seriously awry if …

Adam Ozimek does a very nice job debunking the silly idea that every American should attend college. The guy who proposes this actually tries to justify the notion by noting that "The pay gap between college graduates and everyone else reached a record high last year..."

Let us say every single worker in America had a college degree: What would the pay gap then be between college graduates and everyone else? College graduates would be "everyone else," and would simply get the average wage, on average. Since we would still need carpenters and auto mechanics and hair dressers and janitors, if Leonhardt thinks this average wage will be higher than it is now, he must believe that sending people to college for jobs that don't require college degrees will somehow force their wages up! I don't know about you, but when I hire someone to take down a few trees in my yard, I don't first check if he has a B.A., and then say, "Oh, here's an extra $100!&qu…

I have a lot of Facebook friends who are anarchists. For people who claim to "hate" politics, I have never met a group who are so obsessed with it. For many of them (and I recognize that this is not true of every anarchist friend I have: if it doesn't apply to you, then you are not one of the "many"), it seems that about 90% of their posts are political. They are fixated on promoting their political view to the exclusion of all else.

About 95% of the time, I manage to make the sensible choice and ignore these posts. But every once in a while one of them gets to me: it is usually a combination of a sense of smug superiority in the poster's own views and a sneering contempt for lowly "statists" that leads me to wander in where angels fear to tread.

It happened the other day: someone posted a bit of nonsense from Mike Huemer, claiming that if we don't accept the head of a charity organization simply going around seizing the funds he needs to hel…

Then it is not surprising that some virgins will build up a lot of resentment about their "condition."

Note: In pointing this out, I am absolutely not absolving Elliot Rodger of his crimes. What he did was evil, and he is personally responsible for choosing to do that evil. But recognizing that fact does not preclude examining the circumstances that led that particular evil person to act in that particular evil way.

The man across from me on the subway is eating an orange by gnawing into a half-peeled but still whole fruit. He apparently doesn't realize that it easily comes apart in nice, bite-sized pieces. This wouldn't be of much concern to anyone else but him except that, as a result of his bizarre consumption method, he has left a large puddle of juice and seeds beneath his seat.

And here comes the unfortunate about to take his seat and... Yep, feet right in the puddle.

Andreas Hoffman and I now have our working paper posted at PhilPapers.

Here is the abstract:
The paper aims to explore what it means for something to be a social cycle, for a theory to be a social cycle theory, and to offer a suggestion for a simple, yet, we believe, fundamentally grounded schema for categorizing them. We show that a broad range of cycle theories can be described within the concept of disruption and adjustments. Further, many important cycle theories are true endogenous social cycle theories in which the theory provides a reason why the cycle should recur. We find that many social cycle theories fit with a two-population disruption and adjustment model similar to the well-known predator-prey model. This implies that a general modeling framework could be established for creating agent-based models of many social cycle theories.

Except those of Gerald Gaus:
A moral order of free persons rejects appeal to the natural authority of some people’s private judgments over those of others. A social morality that allows the (self-appointed?) “enlightened” to make moral demands on others that as free and equal moral persons those others cannot see reason to acknowledge is authoritarian. Just as authoritarians in politics hold that they should rule over others who are too unenlightened or corrupt to see the wisdom of their laws, so too do these “enlightened” moralists hold up their “right reasoning” about morality as the standard that warrants their demands about how others should live, even when those others, exercising their rational moral autonomy, cannot endorse the imperatives to which they are subject. -- Gaus, The Order of Public Reason, p. 16
Gaus's invocation of "private judgments" is simply rhetoric, designed to somehow seal off certain areas from the public realm. If I judge that, say, polygamy…

Let us explore a little further how David Stove got Berkeley so wrong. As you may recall, he summarized one of Berkeley's arguments for idealism as follows:

"You cannot have trees-without-the-mind in mind, without having them in mind. Therefore, you cannot have trees-without-the-mind in mind."

But Stove had to add a step to Berkeley's argument to make it stupid: "without having them in mind." The actual argument is that you cannot have trees-without-the-mind in mind, period. What Berkeley is noting in the passage Stove cites is that when you attempt to have trees-without-the-mind in mind, you fail. And that failure is inevitable. "Trees-without-the-mind" is a mere abstraction, and to mistake mere abstractions for things that can actually exist is what Whitehead called "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness."

"Ah," the materialist-minded may say, "but what about the billions of years before conscious evolved, and the unive…

In the comments on this post, Keshav worries that anti-utopianism may lead to complacency: isn't it a good thing, he wonders, to strive for an ideal, even if one knows one will never achieve it?

Good question. I will try to indicate when I think striving toward an ideal is fine and when it is dangerous. Let us move away from politics, to take the emotional charge off of the topic, and consider basketball (which appears to be coming another major theme of this blog).

A basketball shooter should clearly have the goal of making every single shot, even though he knows he will inevitably sometimes miss. But the player slips over into utopianism if he takes this not as an unachievable ideal by which to orient his practice, but as a realistic goal which implies that he should "never rest" until he achieves it. In the latter case, he may decide to increase his time practicing shooting continually so long as he is not hitting 100% of his shots. That approach will prove destructive,…

Is, as economists would say, that privilege exists along many margins. Of course there are situations where merely having white skin is an edge: gaining membership in the Klu Klux Klan is an obvious example. And there are many others where the legacy of past discrimination has accumulated to white people's advantage. But there are other situations where white skin clearly is not an advantage. For instance, my son played for a few weeks in an elite Brooklyn basketball program. Regularly, he would hear his opponents taunt him with, "Yeah, white boy, I'm gonna..." whatever. (I told him he should at least get them to taunt him correctly, as "Half-white, half-Filipino boy.") After a few weeks he couldn't take any more of this and dropped out.

And there are many, many other aspects to privilege: being beautiful can make you privileged. (Beyonce appears to be in a fairly privileged position to me.) Being the president's kids isn't a bad deal. (The kids …

This might seem obvious, were it not for the many anarchists who express their disdain for "politics."

"Anarchy, as Waltz outlines, is a political relationship in which units possess no authority over one another and are not bound under any common authority." -- Marjo Koivisto, "Liberal world orders, reciprocal and hierarchic," in Liberal world orders, p. 108.

To argue for anarchy is a political action, and an anarchic polity certainly cannot do away with politics, since that is precisely what will be going on whenever these units negotiate with one another as to how to resolve some dispute between them.

I am surprised by how often I hear someone declare that a certain type of investment is "good" or another is "bad": "Investing in Manhattan real estate is always good," "Investing where a city is growing is a good idea," "Invest in companies with good cash flow," or "Don't invest in a property with a trailer on it: the value of the trailer declines every year."

What all of these dictums ignore is price! Buying a lot with a trailer on it can be a great investment, if the low price more than accounts for the future decline in the trailer's value. Investing in a growing area of a city can be a terrible investment, if the area has become trendy and prices have risen enough to account for all of that future growth and more.

I sometimes hear the contention, among other complaints about the NBA, that the games are "fixed." This is supposedly so that series go seven games for TV revenue, and so that the big TV market teams wind up going deep in the playoffs.

The NBA must be the worst at fixing its own games of any organization that ever attempted it. Not a single one of the regional semifinals went seven games.

And then, look at this list of top TV markets. Eight teams from the top fifteen markets made the playoffs. How many of them are left?Zero. Instead we have number 16, 25, 37 and 45. Bad job, you game fixers!

Since the same people don't complain about the NFL, MLB, or the NHL being fixed, I begin to suspect that their real complaint about the NBA is "too many black people."

'Each of us occupies such a present as his own; it is a personal present. But it is not composed of so-called "primordial subjective experiences" and our relation to it is not "immediate" or "intuitive" as distinct from reflective. My Venice is not your Venice, and this grove of trees, which to me now is a shelter from the rain or a place to play hide-and-seek, to another (or to me in different circumstances) may be a defense against soil erosion. But there is nothing subjective or esoteric about these various understandings. They may exclude one another but they do not deny one another, and they may be recognized by those who do not share them. Every such object the perception of a subject, but none is "subjective" in the sense of being outside discourse or impervious to error. "Subjectivity" is not an ontological category.' -- Michael Oakshott, On History, p. 12

In anarchist literature, one often finds the contention that the State produces nothing, and is entirely parasitic on the rest of society.

This claim is false. Of course, it is true for some things that modern states do, such as the provision of welfare. But it is false applied to the state as a whole, because there is one service that is highly productive, and that only the state can provide: the service of being the final arbiter for all disputes between its members. This service must, logically, come from a monopoly provider: if there are multiple providers of arbitration at the same level, then none of them are final. (And that is why, if a network of ancap defense agencies can provide this service, they will, in fact, compose a state. And if they can't provide it, then we will have "anarchy" in the bad sense of social chaos.)

Once one focuses on this service, one can easily understand why German barbarians would fight to get inside the Roman Empire: both productivity …

All web browsers I have used on desktops etc. cache web pages: they generally won't reload them unless you ask them to. Particularly, they won't reload them simply because you used another app than the browser for a few minutes. (There are exceptions, like pages of sports scores that auto update.)

But on my iPhone, a device often is only tenuously connected to the Internet, Safari (and other apps, such as The Weather Channel app) attempts to reload the page I was looking at every time I return to it from another app! When, while writing a recent blog post, I was looking at a page listing the 100 largest television markets, I wanted to toggle back-and-forth between the list in Safari and my blogging app, to make sure I got all my numbers correct. Every single time I returned to the page listing TV markets, the page reloaded. And I am pretty sure they were not updating this data every couple of minutes! Aargh!

Bittman's decade long campaign to get people to stop deveining shrimp is getting really annoying, as he seems to be getting frustrated that people don't want to eat shrimp shit:

"Peeling shells for stock is a much better use of your time than deveining, which is a complete waste of energy. (For those who find this a repulsive statement: make a shallow cut on the back side of each shrimp with a paring knife, and pull out the black, threadlike vein. But seriously, use the time for something else.)"

Complete waste of time? Well, perhaps we don't like the taste of shrimp shit, Mark?

"There are several reasons for removing the intestine, the most obvious being the aesthetic appearance of the poop chute (I mean, how can you NOT look at it?!). In addition, the shrimp's colon and its contents can impart a disagreeable taste and gritty texture to the meat or dish." (Here.)

Right. I have had shrimp both ways, and they taste a lot better without the shit,…

Steve Horwitz: 'What the (usually leftist) critics of the book are missing in their simplification of the "good rich and evil poor" is that Rand understood the difference between a genuinely free market and what is now known as "crony capitalism."'

Does the difference go like this? "The genuinely free market is a purely imaginary construct never witnessed by anyone at any time or any place. Crony capitalism is what we actually always get when we let markets dominate social life."

On Facebook, I encountered someone claiming that anyone who did not place liberty above all other values was not a "true libertarian."

I noted that recognizing the multiplicity of human values, and the fact that we must balance one against the other in acting, is a sign of sanity, and that elevating one value above all others is a mark of monomania.

In response, the original poster told me that what I said was merely a cover for wanting to "impose" my "plan" on a large number of people who are not interested in it, through initiating aggression against innocents.

This is what I would refer to as "ideological jujitsu." I did not suggest any "plan," but merely pointed out an aspect of our moral life that has been noted by many others, such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas. I am not attempting to "impose" this reality on anyone: it is simply a fact about our moral life.

For the first time I am delving into the International Relations literature, in the process of reviewing a book called Liberal World Orders. (This is funny in a way, as IR was one of the specialties of my dissertation supervisor.) I was immediately struck by how prevalent Max Weber's concept of "ideal types" is in what I am reading. Here is a typical quote:

"One is to map the various models of liberal international order--both in ideal-typical terms and in their historical setting." (G. John Ikenberry, "Liberal Internationalism 3.0")

"Being then was not, nor not-being. The air was not, nor the sky above it. What kept closing in? Where? And whose the enclosure? And was the plunging abyss all water? Death then was not, nor not-death... Who knows it, and who shall declare where this Creation was born and whence it came?" -- The Rig Vedas

Driving along I 84, I saw a bunch of white shapes on a hill in the distance. "Funny," I thought, "those look like ghosts." (I assumed that what they really were were some trees heavy with white blossoms, and when I got closer, I found I was right.)

But my next thought was, "How did ghosts come to look like white blobs? That is certainly not what Hamlet's father looked like, or Hamlet could not have recognized him. Of course we still have that sort of recognizable ghost in our stories as well. But where did the ghost that looks like a kid with a white sheet over his head come from?

I've been reading a great (as yet) unpublished paper by David Corey. He gave me permission to quote it:
Ultimately, the problem with the first postulate—that the abstract [in politics] is better than the embedded—is that it is simply false. In mathematics, if someone can latch onto one truth, he can often use it to find others. For example if one element of a complex equation can be solved, it may be used to solve the rest. But moral and political “truths” are not like this. We cannot focus on one aspect of the human political terrain, abstracted from the overall context, and expect this to point the way to social harmony. This is because (to put it bluntly) humans are not numbers, and our affairs admit of irreducible contingency. No doubt, we are frustrated by contingency. We wish for a degree of simplicity and universality that human moral claims do not actually possess. But to allow such frustrations to overwhelm us, to insist that the abstract is superior to the embe…

Rappers famously put other rappers down in their lyrics. But for those of you who might be tempted to write this off as some bit of modern decadence, not so fast: in Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga extensively documents what he calls "slanging" matches, consisting in outdoing oen's opponent at being insulting, finding them in ancient China, ancient Rome, pre-Islamic Arabia, the Eddas, Beowulf, The Pilgrimage of Charlemagne, and more.

So next time you bump into Eminem, tell him you like the ancient, traditional slanging that he performs.

Perhaps we can get a perfectly satisfactory materialist, evolutionary explanation of the cause of every one of our moral beliefs. ("We think incest is wrong due to the fact incestuous breeding weakens the gene pool," "We believe stealing is wrong because groups that don't respect property rights failed to prosper," and so on.)

What we would now have is not a theory of moral obligation, but a theory of why moral obligation is an illusion. To illustrate: let us say I convince my son of the truth of "evolutionary morality," and he responds, "Great, that's all it is? I thought there was something wrong with stealing, but now I see that thinking that is a kind of trick that our genes have played on us. Well, personally, I don't give a hoot about the survival of the group, and I'm taking up stealing!"

It should be pretty obvious that the believer in such a materialist, evo…

Somehow it involved some football players, a woman, a hotel in Miami, and a hospital, and one of the football players "changed his way of thinking," although he is not saying how it changed. Quite seriously, except for the names of the players, the previous sentence pretty much gives you all of the information in the original story.

So, I'm watching Anthony Bourdain in Sicily. He is taken out on a fishing trip to catch cuttlefish. He is skeptical about the site his guide brings him to: it looks too well-trafficked with other boats to really provide a good fishing site. But he dives in the water with a facemask on and begins looking for cuttlefish. Then he is betrayed! A colleague of the fishing guide, from another boat, begins to throw dead cuttlefish in the water, so that the stupid tourists can "catch" them and be happy. What deceit! And Bourdain and his crew have caught it all on film.

Except... wait a second: the fishing guide obviously knew there was a whole film crew out there recording his and his colleague's actions. They knew the crew was filming them throwing dead cuttlefish into the water. They could not have been so stupid that they would think that they could get away with this. So I'm forced to conclude that it is actually Anthony Bourdain who is the deceiver here: he must hav…

"Whenever goodness, truth and beauty are realized, universality and particularity are mutually implicated in each other. Universality manifests itself through the particular. This synthesis does of course shun particularity incompatible with itself, but, to become itself, universality requires its own kind of particularity. The more adequate the concrete instantiation, the more profound the awareness of universality that it yields. Universality is transcendent in the sense that none of its particular manifestations exhausts its inspiring value, but without historical particularity universality also is not a living reality, but is only an empty theoretical abstraction created by ahistorical reasoning."
-- Claes Ryn, "Leo Strauss and History: The Philosopher as Conspirator"

It is obvious that citing the NAP as making the case for libertarianism doesn't work at all: it is only convincing to people who are already libertarians, and not even to all of those. So why is it still clung to so tightly? In the comments, Matt wins the cigar:

" It's an appealing thing for some to believe, so they choose to believe it."

Rationalism illustrated: in the movie The Oxford Murders, Elijah Wood's character attempts to master racquetball by writing equations all over the walls of the court calculating possible trajectories for the ball. And the movie shows him as being not too bad at the game as a result.

The fact that anyone thinks this would be a recipe for anything other than complete paralysis on the court illustrates how deeply rationalism has permeated our culture.

I just read the above claim in a paper. It is false, not based on "my ideology" as opposed to "your ideology," but demonstrably false on a scientific basis. (By science here I mean "rational enquiry into some realm of reality.")

To understand why this is so, let us consider someone who says "the essence of private property is the open use of coercion." "Whoa," you may think, "how can anyone claim this? Private property is about my legitimate authority to control what is mine!''

But what about someone who disagrees with me about my legitimate authority over some property? For instance, I presently own ten acres in the Poconos. But suppose some Lenape Indians show up and say, "This was our ancestors' land: we are going to establish a village here." And they then begin constructing a village on "my" land.

Well, I now have two choices: I can abandon my property claim, or I can use coercion to force the…

My wife was very anxious to get me to take a walk up the block to the fair with her. She kept talking about how good the zeppoles were. But when we arrived, she kept telling me, "You know, this vendor looks really interesting. Maybe you should pop in and ask for a sample:"

When I noted a while back that as usually viewed by scientists, the laws of physics fit the definition of "the supernatural" quite well. This produced a bunch of sputtering and muttering, but no real counter-arguments, except that "naturalists don't think of these laws as supernatural!"

Yes, well, that was my point: despite not consciously thinking of them as such, many scientists (and other naturalists) treat them as such. And here is physicist Paul Davies, making the same point:

"The orthodox view of the nature of the laws of physics contains a long list of tacitly assumed properties. The laws are regarded, for example, as immutable, eternal, infinitely precise mathematical relationships that transcend the physical universe... In addition, it is assumed that the physical world is affected by the laws, but the laws are completely impervious to what happens in the universe... It is not hard to discover where this picture of physical laws comes from: it …